Instances of Reactivation, Part IV
I present these scenarios:
1.A bunch, a flock, a crowd of “I”s stands at the narrow mouth of a forking path which is in turn at the mouth of a Galton’s Quincunx. None can pass or allow any other to pass.
2.“One” of the crowd passes anyway, somehow. (Through force or wiliness or some other means, no one has ever been able to determine, but the determination of this "how" could bear on the problem of reactivation.)
3.After the “one” has passed, the others find a capability to pass. What they pass into, however, is somehow not exactly what they had hoped to pass into…It is inexorably marked by the primacy of the passage of the “one.” It appears the others, this additional crowd of “I”’s, passes into a something, a substantial something, an object, which is somehow or other already marked as the property of the “one.”
1.A bunch, a flock, a crowd of “I”s stands at the narrow mouth of a forking path which is in turn at the mouth of a Galton’s Quincunx. None can pass or allow any other to pass.
2.“One” of the crowd passes anyway, somehow. (Through force or wiliness or some other means, no one has ever been able to determine, but the determination of this "how" could bear on the problem of reactivation.)
3.After the “one” has passed, the others find a capability to pass. What they pass into, however, is somehow not exactly what they had hoped to pass into…It is inexorably marked by the primacy of the passage of the “one.” It appears the others, this additional crowd of “I”’s, passes into a something, a substantial something, an object, which is somehow or other already marked as the property of the “one.”
posted by Yusef Asabiyah at 10:24 AM
6 Comments:
I hesitate to call it a mistake, what you are doing with the one. But I will caution against making "the one" which I interpret as an individual, say Descartes, the shaper of the future history of thinking, for those who come after.
Would it not be wise to ask, what shaped Descartes, what made him possible in the first place?
For all we care, he is just a piece of optic, a lens. Foucault tell us, that it is the "episteme" that makes possible Descartes and his thinking.
For some reason, this talk about "the primacy of the passage of the one" reminds me of The Matrix (the movie). If that was the case, there has already passed a previous "the one" before "the one" even arrives. "The one" was essentially for The Architect, a way of containing an "abnormality" that threatened the stability of an otherwise perfect structure of mathematical symmetry (the matrix). While it could not be predicted, it could be contained, in the totality of the myth of "the one".
"I hesitate to call it a mistake, what you are doing with the one. But I will caution against making "the one" which I interpret as an individual, say Descartes, the shaper of the future history of thinking, for those who come after."
There is an ambiguity in the way I laid this out. On the one hand, there is a flock of "I"s at the beginning, at the mouth of the quincunx. These are to be understood more or less as particles. These aren't meant to be thought of as wholes or indivisible. The first one(the first particle) to pass is just the first particle to pass. It's not really that special. It doesn't individuate by dint of being the first one to pass, either. I am glad you thought of the Matrix when you read this--I did too, when I wrote it. But I didn't really mean this connotation to come up. I think, though, that it comes up in a way which can be made illuminating to a variety of phenomena which I am curious about( somewhat along the lines you mention, too.)
--Yusef
Hmmmm, my first association was a flock of sperm cells, busily wagging their tails and raising their proud "I" heads in a Darwinian struggle to be "the one" to gain access -
"through force or wiliness or some other means, no one has ever been able to determine..."After "the one" - master-signifier -
"has passed, the others find a capability to pass. What they pass into, however, is somehow not exactly what they had hoped to pass into…It is inexorably marked by the primacy of the passage of the “one.”The whole exercise is about the supremacy of the principle of accidence and contingency, isn't it?
"The Matrix" is modern Platonism, the simulacrum at work (there is even a quick picture of Baudrillard's book early in the movie) - so that would make the bunch of "I"s copies (or originals!) -
...that pass into a something, a substantial something, an object, which is somehow or other already marked as the property of the “one.”What's with this "the one" stuff, anyway? It smacks too damned much of theology :-) - We can't have that!
Orla
Curious that you refer to a particle as an "I" .. To be an "I" requires a reflective existence .. like, a human one. Could we call a chair an "I" too?
I think to say "to be an 'I' requires a reflective existence" is to repeat those untested assumptions and conventions which I want to test and contest.
You're calling upon a chair as an example of an object which can't be a subject. Do you see how even this simple gesture of yours is of interest and use to me?
--Yusef
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